What do Knight Capital’s rogue trading algorithms and summer blockbusters have in common? A surprising amount, potentially. Tom Cruise may be known for the Mission Impossible franchise, his mad underwear dancing skills, and jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch, but we prefer to remember him in the movie Minority Report. Here, society had evolved to a point where they could predict crimes before they happened, and make preemptive arrests. Wasn’t a bad flick, but we have to say – we never thought we’d see it made real in our lifetime. As it turns out, the kinds of algorithmic research that back so much of the trading done in equities and commodities may end up facilitating just that. Forbes reports:

For a few years researchers have also been exploring their use in fighting crime too, typically by sifting through a wealth of statistical data about criminal events in a certain location over previous years, then using that data to extrapolate when crime might happen in that same area. Methods like this are being shopped by tech companies like PredPol and tested by police in LA,Santa Cruz and elsewhere.

Researcher Mirco Musolesi is coming at this emerging trend from another angle. Rather than predict when a criminal event will happen on a particularly susceptible street, he is working on predicting where it would happen. This method is a little more controversial because it wouldn’t rely on old crime data, but by tracking potential criminals and their movements via their mobile phones.

This idea was borne out of Musolesi’s research into what he calls mobility patterns, which he recently published as part of his research at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Recently he won Nokia‘s Mobile Data challenge by predicting the movements of 25 volunteers working in a town in Switzerland. He used GPS data, telephone numbers and their texting and calling history to do it, and the algorithm was at times able to predict where these volunteers were heading to within 20 square meters.

Strange times, to be sure. At the end of the day, it’s good to see the billions put toward algorithmic research yielding some actionable information; it’s probably easier to predict which convenience store will be robbed than where crude prices will be 3 months from now. That being said… Musolesi – any chance you can develop something that will make up for all the incompetent regulators out there?